More than 7 000 state schools, housing 3,6-million pupils, have so far been identified as qualifying for fee exemptions in terms of the government’s new means-tested fee subsidy scheme.
It emerged recently that all the provinces except Gauteng and Mpumalanga have completed the audits of school catchment areas required as a first step towards instituting the scheme.
But the Act compelling these schools to drop fees will come into effect only in January next year, so it remains unclear how many schools will benefit sooner than that.
Teacher unions also expect some schools to challenge the status they are assigned — whether no-fee or fee-charging — depending on their financial circumstances.
Based on only six provinces’ data, education Director General Duncan Hindle told Parliament in February that 6 975 of the poorest schools there had been identified, with a total of 3 644 349 pupils. There are between 12-million and 13-million pupils in public schools.
Since Hindle’s presentation, the Western Cape has announced that it has identified 424 primary schools, with 146 192 pupils, that could choose to become no-fee schools this year. Neither Gauteng nor Mpumalanga responded to the Mail & Guardian’s request this week for their data, and the national department said it had not received figures from these provinces either.
The Education Laws Amendment Act allows Minister of Education Naledi Pandor to declare schools to which the government allocates the state-determined minimum adequacy benchmark of R527 — or more — per learner ”no fee schools”.
The Act is the culmination of a process that began in 2002, when the education department acknowledged that schools were frequently flouting the fees exemption policy, that some provinces’ allocations to schools were inadequate, and that substantial inter-provincial inequalities in school funding continued.
Teacher unions, however, point out that the wild cards in the progress towards free education for the poor are the provinces. ”There is a grey area concerning what the national minister can and cannot tell the provinces to do,” said Jon Lewis, research and media officer for the South African Democratic Teachers Union. ”The success of the moves to no fee schools depends on each province budgeting adequately for them.”
Lewis also said legal challenges to provincial decisions about the status of schools could be expected.
Dave Balt, president of the National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa, raised concerns about the adequacy of the appeals process. ”What about the schools not on the [no-fee] list?” he asked. ”We are worried that there will be a large sector disgruntled that they are not getting as much money as no-fee schools.”
The unevenness of provinces’ progress so far in compiling data derives from the ”interim implementation measure” this year, said Firoz Patel, deputy director general in the Department of Education. This has required considerable discussion — and ”especially the cooperation of schools in accepting [their] changed status. Next year the process is clearly defined in the Education Laws Amendment Act.”
Based on information from the provinces, Pandor will declare by the end of September which schools must abolish fees next year.